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Ruth King

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The Coronavirus Death Rate Is MUCH Lower Than the Estimates Justifying the Lockdowns… By Matt Margolis

By on May 4th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2020/05/03/at-least-five-studies-have-shown-that-the-coronavirus-fatality-rate-is-under-1-percent-n387776

Appearing on Justice with Judge Jeanine on Saturday night, Dr. Debora Birx admitted something that anyone paying attention to the coronavirus pandemic has known for some time now. “I think we underestimated very early on the number of asymptomatic cases,” Dr. Birx said. “And I think we’re really beginning to understand there are people that get infected that those symptoms are so low-grade that they don’t even know that they’re infected.”

The question, of course, is how much? Well, we have a rough idea already.

But, first, let’s go back to what experts said originally. Back in March, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated a 3.4 percent fatality rate and Dr. Anthony Fauci estimated that the fatality rate of the coronavirus was about 2 percent. “If you look at the cases that have come to the attention of the medical authorities in China, and you just do the math, the math is about 2%.”

Some of us will remember how President Trump endured a lot of criticism for saying that he had a “hunch” that the WHO’s estimate was too high and that the fatality rate of the coronavirus might actually be below 1 percent. “Well, I think the 3.4 percent is really a false number. Now, and this is just my hunch, and — but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this. Because a lot of people will have this and it’s very mild. They’ll get better very rapidly. They don’t even see a doctor. They don’t even call a doctor,” Trump said. “I think that that number is very high. I think the number, personally, I would say the number is way under 1 percent.”

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People with low vitamin D levels more likely to die from coronavirus, study finds By Natalie O’Neill

By on May 4th, 2020

https://nypost.com/2020/05/01/people-with-low-vitamin-d-levels-more-likely-to-die-from-coronavirus-study-finds/?

People with low levels of vitamin D may be more likely to die from the coronavirus, according to a preliminary study.

Researchers at Queen Elizabeth Hospital Foundation Trust and the University of East Anglia in England compared the average vitamin D levels of 20 European countries with COVID-19 mortality rates — and found “significant relationships” between vitamin D levels and the number of deaths caused by this infection.

The study, which has not been peer-reviewed, notes sun-starved “Nordic” countries are among the most at risk.

“We believe that we can advise vitamin D supplementation to protect against SARS-CoV2 infection,” the researchers wrote.

The finding falls in line with previous research that suggests healthy vitamin D levels can reduce the risk of respiratory infections.

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British Jews Are Too Eager to Embrace Starmer’s Still Dubious Labour Party by Melanie Phillips

By on May 3rd, 2020

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/05/03/british-jews-are-too-eager-to-embrace-starmers-still-dubious-labour-party/

JNS.org – In both Britain and America, the Jewish community is increasingly badly served by leaders who seem less and less able to distinguish between the friends and the enemies of the Jewish people.

In America, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations has been convulsed by controversy over appointing Dianne Lob as its new chairman. Lob is the former president of HIAS, an organization originally established to assist Jewish refugees, but which has morphed into a body closely associated with anti-Israel and Islamist groups.

In Britain this week, Conservative MP Robert Halfon mounted a startlingly outspoken attack on the Jewish community’s main representative body, the Board of Deputies, for having a “left of center political agenda.”

His criticism was triggered by its weekly bulletin that, he said, read like a “political broadcasting service” for the Labour Party.

The background to this fracas is the replacement of the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn by Sir Keir Starmer — a former human rights lawyer, Director of Public Prosecutions, and more centrist figure than his far-left predecessor.

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The Contradiction at the Heart of Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light By Nicholas M. Gallagher

By on May 3rd, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/05/18/the-contradiction-at-the-heart-of-hilary-mantels-the-mirror-and-the-light/

The Mirror and the Light, by Hilary Mantel (Henry Holt, 784 pp., $30)

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall was a high-cultural phenomenon. The novel, published in 2009, retold the story of the downfall of Sir (Saint) Thomas More and the rise of Thomas Cromwell: A Man for All Seasons, but with the good guy and bad guy reversed. In Mantel’s telling, More was a religious fanatic, an embodiment of the deliberate, persecuting medieval darkness, while Cromwell was the new man, an omni-talented, self-made son of a blacksmith whose virtues were above all else moderation and practicality. Written with a brilliant combination of arresting detail and swift movement, the novel won the Man Booker Prize (the “British Pulitzer”), as did its 2012 sequel Bring Up the Bodies. The books spawned a Royal Shakespeare Company play and a BBC miniseries and became a worldwide sensation among the serious set.

Then — nothing. The third book in what was announced as a trilogy was supposed to come out in 2018. Then, 2017 brought rumors of delay . . . 2018 . . . 2019 . . . The literati thought they knew why. While the Wolf Hall novels are fiction, their characters are, of course, historical figures. And Thomas Cromwell, after triumphing over More and Anne Boleyn, overseeing the dissolution of the monasteries, procuring Henry VIII’s marriages to his third and fourth wives, and significantly advancing the cause of Protestantism in England, was executed by orders of that monarch on July 28, 1540. If Mantel finished her trilogy, in other words, she was going to have to kill her hero.

Now the third book, The Mirror and the Light, is here. Read page by page — that is to say, taking the measure of the book by the quality of the prose — it is another masterpiece, a worthy successor to its forebears. There are some reasons, however, to think that the rumors were right — that the death of Cromwell presented a challenge for Mantel. Of the novel’s 754 pages, there is not a hint of trouble for Cromwell until around the 600th, and the crisis leading to his death does not break until about the 700th. This would not be a problem were there some other narrative arc Mantel was intent on tracing. But there isn’t, really. The Mirror and the Light, unlike Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, does not have a central conflict. In Wolf Hall, the clash with More and the struggle to secure Henry’s divorce and remarriage gave a narrative coherence to the work. In Bring Up the Bodies, Cromwell squared off in a zero-sum contest — death or absolute power — with Anne Boleyn. The Mirror and the Light begins where Bring Up the Bodies left off, just after the execution of Boleyn and her supposed lovers. Henry VIII, now a widower, is free to marry Jane Seymour, and does. Cromwell, having brought this state of affairs to pass, is master secretary (and soon lord privy seal), in fact if not in title the most powerful man in England.

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Ramadan: The public call to Muslim prayer for the sake of unity and diversity Diane Bederman

By on May 3rd, 2020

https://dianebederman.com/ramadan-the-public-call-to-muslim-prayer-for-the-sake-of-unity-and-diversity/

Easter and Passover have come and gone and millions of people were unable to be together because of Covid 19-the Chinese virus.

But Ramadan is here and for 30 days Muslims fast and pray. New rules. There is a public call to Muslim prayer. In cities and towns in America and Canada our politicians decided for the sake of unity and diversity that we should all have the opportunity to hear the Call to Prayer for Muslims. It’s about creating a sense of unity and comfort and sharing the religion with others  which requires that noise laws be relaxed. Toronto Municipal Code, city spokesperson Tammy Robbinson explained:

“Spiritual, emotional, and mental well-being is important during these difficult times.”

In Hamilton, Ontario twice daily calls to prayer, the Adhaan are allowed until May 24. Imam Sayed Tora said he was “thrilled” council was open to the request from the downtown and Mountain mosques. The Mountain mosque leader said the pandemic lockdown is particularly hard on members forced to stay apart during Ramadan, a time when local mosques are normally “buzzing beehives” of activity.

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BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Howard Zinn’s Tendentious Mendacity William D. Rubinstein

By on May 3rd, 2020

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/04/tendentious-mendacity/

In recent decades Howard Zinn (1922–2010) became probably the best-known radical historian of American history, almost exclusively through the book he published in 1980, A People’s History of the United States, 1492–Present. This gained for Zinn what Mary Grabar describes in her introduction as “Icon, Rock Star” status, making him nationally known outside narrow academic confines. He is also one of the few historians who has generated a comprehensive refutation of his errors and biases, which Mary Grabar ably sets out at length in Debunking Howard Zinn.

Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation Against America
by Mary Grabar

Since Zinn’s work is unlikely to be known to most Australian readers, something must be said about his background and historical methodology. He was born in New York in 1922 to Eastern European Jewish parents who were (literally) dirt poor, his father working as a ditch digger and window cleaner during the Depression, and later as a waiter. In his teens, Zinn attended a Communist Party rally in New York, where he was knocked unconscious by charging police, apparently a traumatic event for him. In 1940 he worked as an apprentice in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where he and others lost no time in organising an Apprentice Association, already demonstrating his outsider’s propensity for radical activism. After the war (in which he was an Army Air Force bombardier, an experience which made him into a lifelong near-pacifist), Zinn attended New York University and Columbia University. He has been widely accused of being an active member of the American Communist Party (which he denied), the FBI taking him seriously enough to compile a 423-page dossier on his activities.

In 1956 Zinn landed a teaching job at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, an institution established in the late nineteenth century for black women. Unsurprisingly, Zinn fails to discuss the college’s background in his autobiography You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train (2002), since the college is named for its chief benefactor, Laura Spelman Rockefeller, whose husband was John D. Rockefeller, in real terms the richest capitalist in American history.

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Emperor Xi Has No Clothes Daryl McCann

By on May 3rd, 2020

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/05/emperor-xi-has-no-clothes/

China’s celebrated billionaire property-developer Ren Chiqiang did not hold back in his response to the teleconferenced speech by President-for-life Xi Jinping on February 23 about the status of COVID-19: “I saw not an emperor standing there exhibiting his ‘new clothes’ but a clown prince who stripped naked and insisted on being emperor.” The late Dr Li Wenliang was arrested in Wuhan in December last year after alerting people on his microblog to the danger of the novel coronavirus. Dr Li’s crime, according to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), was spreading rumours to fellow medical practitioners. In reality, of course, Li was being truthful, not only about a new viral respiratory illness, but also the People’s Republic of China: “I think a healthy society should not just have one voice.”

How we respond to the pandemic of 2020 will tell us a lot about our long-held biases. The subject of our fury turns out to be, more often than not, what we already believed is wrong with the world. Gail Collins, an opinion columnist for the New York Times, decided on February 26 that her readers should call COVID-19 “the Trump virus”. A more helpful suggestion, perhaps, might be to rename Collins’s four-year-long malady Trump Derangement Virus (TDV). Elizabeth Lopatto, also suffering from TDV, had this to say in the Verge on March 12: “The best thing he can do for the country, to speed its response to the novel coronavirus, is to resign and let someone capable take over.” Peter Wehner, a day later in the Atlantic, announced the potential good news about the COVID-19 that those who have contracted TDV are so desperate to hear: “The Trump Presidency is over.”

For the rest of us, though, potential good news would be more along the lines of a medical cure. Various solutions have already been mooted, although the general availability of a single-purpose vaccine might be as much as eighteen months away. At his March 19 White House briefing, President Trump touted a promising, if not scientifically verified, medicine usually used in the treatment of malaria and severe cases of arthritis: “Now, a drug called … chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine. Now, this is a common malaria drug … it’s been around for a long time, so we know that … if things don’t go as planned, it’s not going to kill anybody.” Scientists and scientific journals were quick to note that hydroxychloroquine has not been subjected to “thorough rigorous clinical trials” with regards to COVID-19, even if anecdotal evidence points to its effectiveness as a cure and, conceivably, a preventive measure. Trump, pointedly, made his comment in the context of his support for the Right to Try Act, passed into law in May 2018. This law empowers patients in desperate straits and “unable to participate in a clinical trial” the right to “access certain unapproved treatments”. The widespread distribution of hydroxychloroquine, if properly monitored, is actually “beyond”—Trump’s word—the Right to Try Act, because chloroquine has been available for almost eighty years. There is the added factor that the supervised distribution of hydroxychloroquine, or a comparable undocumented treatment for COVID-19 such as HIV medication Kaletra, could in itself serve as a clinical trial.

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Who Invited The World To Infect America? Ilana Mercer

By on May 3rd, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/02/who-invited-the-world-to-infect-america/

Hate the Chinese government if you wish, but hold your own government responsible for hollowing America out like a husk.

On March 31, the number of Americans dead from the Chinese coronavirus stood at 3,900! A mere month on, at the time of writing, and 63,801 Americans have perished.

American deaths by COVID-19 account for a quarter of the world’s, including those in the undeveloped world. To ignore this Third-World-like specter is to dismiss the dead and the dying. It’s tantamount to cancel culture.

China sucks. But if the United States must rely on the Chinese government to keep its citizens safe, then what kind of a Mickey Mouse country are we?

If the American people can be convinced by their government to saddle a foreign power with the responsibility for their existential welfare—what kind of people are we?

China didn’t force the traitors of the American economy to shift crucial production lines to its country and strand Americans without surgical and N-95 masks and medication; homegrown turncoats made that decision, all by their lonesome.

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Kim Jong-Un Emerges After 20 Days Out of Public View By Rick Moran

By on May 3rd, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/05/02/kim-jong-un-emerges-after-20-days-out-of-public-view-n387591

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was seen in public for the first time in 20 days, ending speculation that he may have been seriously ill or dead.

Kim was seen cutting a ribbon and walking around a new fertilizer plant near Pyongyang. He was accompanied by his sister, Kim Yo-jong, who many North Korea watchers believe would take over for him in the event of his untimely demise.

State media showed videos and photos of Kim wearing a black Mao suit and constantly smiling, walking around facilities, applauding, cutting a huge red ribbon with a scissor handed by his sister, and smoking inside and outside of buildings while talking with other officials.

Seemingly thousands of workers, many of them masked, stood in lines at the massive complex, roaring in celebration and releasing balloons into the air. A sign installed on a stage where Kim sat with other senior officials read: “Sunchon Phosphatic Fertilizer Factory; Completion Ceremony; May 1, 2020.”

We’ll probably never know why Kim disappeared but the most logical explanation is that he was trying to avoid exposure to the coronavirus. After North Korea couldn’t hide the extent of the pandemic anymore, Kim disappeared.

There were no clear signs that Kim was in discomfort. He was shown moving without a walking stick, like the one he used in 2014 when he was recovering from a presumed ankle surgery. However, he was also seen riding a green electric cart, which appeared similar to a vehicle he used in 2014.

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB Comments turned off

Gov. Andrew Cuomo Had the Worst Response to the Crisis of Any Governor in America Rick Moran

By on May 3rd, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/05/02/gov-cuomo-had-the-worst-response-to-the-crisis-of-any-governor-in-america-n387642

The press has been gushing about the performance of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo for weeks. The media often compares Cuomo’s “decisive” response to the coronavirus pandemic to the president, and guess who always wins?

Whether it’s good PR from the governor’s office or just the media worshipping a liberal who says mean things about Donald Trump, it hardly matters. What matters is results. And in that department, Andrew Cuomo has been a miserable failure — using several metrics.

And it’s not just the numbers. The panicky, sometimes hysterical New York governor began whining about the federal government (specifically the president) not doing anything to help the states with getting medical supplies. Back in March, he kept saying he needed 30-40,000 ventilators. And when Trump pointed out that was silly, he accused the president of being an unfeeling monster.

National Review:

“I have a feeling that a lot of the numbers that are being said in some areas are just bigger than they’re going to be,” Trump said on March 27. “I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators,” he added, referring to Cuomo’s estimate for New York state. Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and others said they had “facts” on their side.

By the middle of April, New York was sending ventilators to other states.

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